Growing Gains
| Description | This project aims to change children’s eating habits by developing exciting practical activities around growing food. |
|---|---|
| Setting | Schools |
| Populationting | Schoolchildren in Birmingham |
| Intervention summary | Children grow food in schools or local allotments, learn about the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables, and act as ‘health ambassadors’ to their parents and the wider community. |
| Outcome Summary | Increased awareness of food issues and changes in the children’s diet. |
| Startup Cost | Difficult to quantify but, for a new scheme, you would have to factor in staff training, acquiring teaching resources and the construction of raised beds at the schools. These costs have been built into our annual cost per school (see Running cost). |
| Running Cost | Running costs: £3000-4000 each school year |
| Funding | By Primary Care Trusts, regeneration funding and self financing by schools. |
| Started | September 2002 |
| Ended | Ongoing |
| Location | Birmingham, England |
| Contact |
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Background
The project aims to change eating habits by developing exciting practical activities around growing food. Children grow food in schools or local allotments, learn about the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables, and act as ‘health ambassadors’ to their parents and the wider community.
What is the problem you are trying to solve?
School children in Birmingham have very poor diets. They have a very low awareness of the availability of fruit and vegetables or the need to include them in a balanced diet.
What local organisations are involved?
Birmingham Foodnet, Birmingham City Council, South Birmingham Primary Care Trust, Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust, King’s Norton New Deal for Communities and Birmingham Health Education Unit are all involved.
How many people are running this project and who are they?
There is a full time Growing Gains project officer and two part time project assistants.
What local population are you targeting?
We are targeting children, in particular, those at key stage 2 aged 7-11 years, attending schools in Birmingham. We are focusing the project in areas suffering from multiple deprivation, such as Handsworth, Kings Norton 3 Estates and Perry Barr. We are also looking to set up the project in other parts of the UK.
How many people are you targeting?
The 2006-7 project is working with approximately 750 children.
Interventions
What interventions are you using to address the problem?
We run fortnightly sessions in schools in areas of Birmingham as detailed above. These sessions address issues including: what is healthy food; fresh food identification; basic gardening techniques; and the maintenance of a vegetable garden. A garden is created on the school’s grounds or a nearby allotment site. At the end of the school year, a healthy meal is created using food grown from the garden and eaten with the children.
Is the project design based on evidence? If so, please state reference.
No, research has been informal, ongoing and largely anecdotal, although the Government’s 5-A-Day initiative 1 has been useful in implementing the Growing Gains project.
Outcome
What outcomes or planned outcomes are you measuring?
We are measuring increased awareness of food issues, changes in diet and increase in the number of children responding ‘yes’ to questions such as ‘have you ever eaten anything you have grown?’ Changes in diet are measured by pre-course and post-course questionnaires, food diaries, interviews with parents, classroom discussions and by collection of quotes from young participants.
Do you have any outcomes or results yet? If so, what are they?
We only have informal results from food diaries and photographs gathered by schools and project officers, which we put into reports to funders.
We are currently undertaking a behaviour change review for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which we hope to use to improve and promote the project.
Is your project relevant to a government target or guideline?
Public Service Agreement: To halt the year on year rise in obesity among children under 11 by 2010 in the context of a broader strategy to tackle obesity in the population as a whole. 2
Feedback
What obstacles did you have to overcome to set up this project?
The main obstacle is trying to engage a staff member within the school to actively participate in caring for the garden, or ensure that children are maintaining the garden in inter-session periods. With special schools there is a need to extract the concepts from the session material and demonstrate and illustrate these without relying on printed material. Some children in special schools have specific physical needs which require the garden to be designed carefully to ensure that these needs are met.
What have you learned about the project so far?
The project is now well established with an 18 session curriculum, which is adapted to suit the needs of individual schools. We have learnt that this is the most effective way to see the project through and keep the pupils and teachers engaged because out of school activities are often dependent on enthusiastic individuals within schools.
We have had to make significant changes to the structure of the project in special schools, and are currently looking at the changes needed to run a full scheme in a secondary school.
What would you do differently?
We are currently looking at ways in which our behaviour change review will be able to be used to enhance the work we are doing.